Facebook accounts sold by hackers on the Dark Web

It appears that Facebook accounts are still up for grabs, albeit illegally, on the Dark Web for the super low price of $3 or less. This appears to be continuing the trend from the past, in the sense that there are still accounts being sold on the Dark Web for low prices.

A study by the Money Guru found that Facebook accounts were able to be purchased for about £2.30 Pounds (about $3 US dollars). Interestingly, this study was produced only hours after recent news about 50 million Facebook accounts being breached.

In addition, it appears that the email accounts that are connected to some Facebook accounts are even up for sale. Which unfortunately means that once a breached account is sold it can now possibly survive attempts by its legitimate owner to recover their account. This is because the recovery process generally uses the email that was used to register the Social Media account to begin with.

How to avoid your Social Media accounts from being stolen?

If you are concerned with your Social Media accounts being stolen and/or sold on the Dark Web there are a few things that you can do. First, on connected email accounts, you can use a feature such as 2FA (2 Factor Authentication), this feature requires multiple verification methods that are there to ensure that only the legitimate account owner can access the account. This usually involves using either your mobile phone or a dedicated hardware device to be able to generate a secure code of sorts. This code is then used to verify that you are actually permitted to login to the email account.

Many Social Media platforms also support 2FA to login to the account itself. Such methods can employ the above techniques, as well as being able to email or text message you a code that you can use to login. Thus, identifying that you are who you say you are, regardless of if you know the password to accounts in question.